Friday, April 3, 2015

I am so, so sorry that I have been neglecting my blog a bit. I have a few ideas for upcoming blog posts, and I hope to be more active here in the near future.

As some of you may know, I have been designing a toilet shelter for rural Cambodians. Almost 70% of rural Cambodians don't have access to sanitation--and that means children are suffering from all sorts of terrible diseases, like cholera and typhoid. My organization, WaterSHED, has successfully sold over 100,000 toilets in Cambodia, but the biggest remaining barrier to widespread toilet adoption is the price of a desirable shelter for the toilet. My team has been designing an affordable, flat-pack, easy-assemble attractive shelter for Cambodian consumers, and soon we want to take our design from prototype to production. You can learn more about our product here: http://www.watershedasia.org/why-shelters-matter/ Or just watch this short video:

We have entered our design into a competition that, if we win, will provide us with support to set up manufacturing. WaterSHED's extensive sales network will serve as our distribution network--we work with over 170 businesses that reach 40% of Cambodia's population, and we're exploring partnerships with major multinational corporations to expand throughout Asia--and manufacturing is the most major missing component. However, to make it to the finals of this competition, we need to be in the top 10 receivers of votes in an online competition.

About Me

I'm one of those weird kurta-wearing, broken Hindi-speaking Americans who can't get enough of India. From 2007 to 2013, I spent a cumulative 3 years in India, living in Pondicherry, Delhi, Shimla, and Varanasi, conducting field work in Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand, and visiting 26 out of 28 states (err, 29 once Telangana is official!). I recently completed a mechanical engineering master's degree, and for my thesis I worked on irrigation technology for smallholder farmers in eastern India. Now that I've graduated, I have moved to a new region of the world: Indochina. I work as a product designer at an organization in Phnom Penh that tackles water and sanitation challenges in rural Cambodia and Vietnam using market-based approaches (I should probably change "autorickshaw" to "tuk tuk" in my blog title). In this blog I write about my experiences and my thoughts on development issues. I took the title photo in a village in Kachchh, Gujarat in July 2011.